It seems like the trailer for Skyrim being released (I know that was weeks ago, I live weeks in the past, man) has brought my hype-o-meter for Oblivion up to an all-time high, and it seems like that is true for others. I’ve been watching Dibella’s Watch for the past couple weeks to see if it would live up to my lofty standards for Oblivion moditude, in that it looks pretty, looks meaty gameplay-wise, and doesn’t look like the bad parts of Japan’s animation industry walked over and sat on it. Fortunately, from what’s been released so far the first and third criteria have been met with a promise that the second criterion will be fulfilled soon.

And with the pace that Antiscamp (creator of Fairy Tale and Hundred Years War, both for Civilization IV) has been setting, I’d say with a fair deal of confidence not attributed to my latent clairvoyant powers that the final version will be out well before Skyrim comes out, which happens to be his deadline for completion. Seriously, he’s averaging about a release a week at this point.

With that, I realize that I haven’t even explained what the dealio is with this mod: it adds a large landmass accessible from the Anvil ports. It’s not a total conversion like Nehrim is and MERP will be, so you can gallivant around in it with the Oblivion character you already have. As for the lore-friendliness, Antiscamp assured me that it will be lore-friendly, but the landmass itself is not based on any part of the continent of Tamriel. It’s new and mysterious.

If you really want to, you can download it right now. It’s on the fifth beta so far, so there’s only a sparse offering of quests and it’s probably going to be hilariously buggy, so play at your own risk, I guess. I’d play, but FCOM decided to laugh in my face when I tried to get back into Oblivion.

Go for it!

This was supposed to be a post on Grand Theft Auto 4, then I realized that there’s not much in the ways of mods for it. So, here’s ENBSeries a mod for a whole mess of games with the sole purpose of giving you more graphics. Not simply better graphics, but more graphics in general.

I’ve never quite understood the ceaseless quest for better and better graphics, especially when applied to Grand Theft Auto 4, which chews up and spits out computers before it begrudgingly runs. I’m playing it on all medium with no anti-aliasing and I’m enjoying it, gosh darn it. But for those of you who feel that GTA 4′s graphics are so last year (which they are, if you possess the vision broken enough to believe that graphics become outdated in a short year’s worth of time), here’s ENBSeries. Again.

What ENBSeries does is add a whole mess of acronyms specially designed to make your game look better.  GTA 4 in particular gets–but is not limited to–better anti-aliasing, a better blur filter (as seen from the above screenshot), better reflections, post-processing effects and possibly SSAO. I do love me some SSAO, especially in my Minecrafts. Of course, GTA4 is not the only game with ENBSeries support, and older games like Serious Sam, San Andreas and Deus Ex get the handy-dandy feature of actually running on DirectX 9, instead of DirectX less than 9.

A word to the wise (and not-so-wise): ENBSeries needs quite a handful of tweaking to get it looking just right. I’d recommend digging around for  config files, especially for GTA4. If you think yourself adventurous enough, the power is yours.

ENBSeries’s homepage. It’s a little sparse, but the download page has most everything.

Also, to those of you that sent in applications. Our editor, a Mr. Lewis Denby of PCGamer, is on a business trip in Holland. Once he comes back, I’ll start setting up worthy writers with wondrous writing accounts.

Protip: I’ll be gone until Tuesday. If I’m not postin’ by Wednesday, next Monday for sure. Enjoy your Christmases, everyone.

I say “different morrowind” for two reasons. One, it’s not a Morrowind mod, it’s for Oblivion. Two, it’s not the Vvardenfell we all know and love, it’s (at least a small slice of) the mainland Morrowind we’ve never seen. Also, it’s promised as being about nine times bigger than Cyrodiil, though the exact size and landmass of it… I’m not entirely sure yet. The provided region map doesn’t give an accurate enough comparison to Cyrodiil, so judging how big it really is would be a bit of a challenge. I’m downloading it right now.

And what a download it’ll be. It weighs in at a hefty 1.4GB spread across  four separate files, with the aforementioned Morrowind expansion map, voice acting (!!), quests, four major cities so far.

Download faster, internet.

Download it hereabouts. You need all four packages.

Not a whole lot going on in the wide world of modding this week (so far at least) so I might as well talk about an Oblivion mod I found interesting: Windfall. It seems like once you think you know about all of the massive Oblivion mods (and there are those that you don’t need to talk about much seeing as they’re crazy popular like FCOM and Midas Magic), seven more pop up to steal more of your ever-dwindling free time.

Windfall would be one such mod. It’s seeming like the Oblivion mod scene has been dwindling in favor of the Fallout crowd, as roughly 2 mods in the TESNexus Top 25 for the last two weeks are actually original mods, whilst the others are split between years-old overhauls and the so-called “sexy mods.” Hey, if you want to run around Cryodiil and its surrounding areas as a sixteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirl with wings, go right ahead. But for the rest of us, here, again, is Windfall, a gigantic quest mod.

At first glance, Windfall seems like a incredibly large mod. If you thought this, then your first glance was right, as Windfall’s developers attest that on average players will complete up to 42 quests. Which, when compared to the Oblivion main quest’s 17 separate missions, is quite a lot indeed. The quests themselves are structured similar to those of the ones in Morrowind where the quest locations aren’t explicitly marked on your map, forcing the player to figure out where he or she is supposed to go.

In terms of new areas, Windfall adds the titular Windfall Island, which could have little to no relation with the Wind Waker island of the same name, which is rife with corruption and poverty and a powderkeg of rebellion. Mmm, political intrigue. This is in addition to the various new armors, weapons, dungeons, NPCs, etcetera.

If you’re so inclined, you can download it either at their website or at TESNexus

It looks that the Oblivion giganto-mod Nehrim has released English subtitles and UI translations. Therefore, those of us who don’t speak or read German can enjoy what this mod has to offer, which apparently, is quite a lot.

It’s really weird seeing a mod for Oblivion that isn’t actually Oblivion. Normally, the mods are just enhancements, addons or changes for the actual Oblivion game itself, while Nehrim actually copies your Oblivion folder, replaces most of the assets for the game and leaves the end result almost unrecognizable for fans of the original game.

The screenshots, are nevertheless, impressive. I gave this mod a miss when it first came out, mostly because I didn’t understand any German at all, but since I happen to be a fan of everything about Oblivion except the main quest I’ll probably try it out now. From initial impressions, this seems like an interesting diversion to an already established formula. You know, by reverting from the system where you leveled up individual skills to a more classic one where you used experience points to level up.

The story is promised to be deep and a whole bunch of other adjectives that imply substance. Since Oblivion’s plot was mostly clichéd,  lacking memorable characters except Patrick Stewart, it’ll be neat to see what Nehrim does differently from its base.

We shall see.

Oh hey it looks like I forgot the home page link.

Confession time! Well, it’s not like I’m ashamed of it or anything, but I find the Elder Scrolls lore really, really boring. I’ve never been won over by any of its backstory – God knows I likes me some po-faced high fantasy, but Bethesda’s take on the genre has simply never done it for me. So the idea of a total conversion for Oblivion gets my attention, given that by definition it’s throwing out everything I didn’t like about the game.

Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge is a sweeping re-write of The Elder Scrolls IV, ditching Bethesda’s world entirely and throwing in a fantasy world of the modders’ own creation. It’s a German team doing the work, and now the mod’s been completely finished in their native tongue they’re translating it to English. It’s currently going through a brief spot of beta testing, then they hope to have it out around the end of August.

You can watch the final trailer for the German release below. I find it interesting they’re apparently planning to keep the German speech and merely subtitle everything – I’d prefer more teams do it that way.

The trailer seems fairly, uh, po-faced – lots of little dialogue snippets delivered in a tone of voice that implies Serious Business – and bonus unintentional comedy points for brazenly lifting that tune from Mass Effect 2. Still, it’s big, expansive-looking, polished, and it’s not bloody Tamriel. Maybe I’ll actually score myself a copy of TES IV and give this one a shot.

The ModDB page for Nehrim: At Fate’s Edge is here. If you speak German, or you’re feeling adventurous, you can get it already!

Well now here’s an interesting surprise. Modder MadMaximus (and his brother) is creating a mod… of some sort for the Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion. I don’t know much else other than that, except for the fact that it’ll be released in episodic form, which lends me to believe that it’s going to be a total conversion instead of an add-on like most Oblivion mods are. The reason I’m posting about this mod, is that all of the screenshots are in-game screenshots, and that it’s supposed to come out in a couple of months… maybe. I can hear my PC crying, since it struggles to run Oblivion as it is. But when and if the mod actually manages to see the light of day, it should provide some terrain that isn’t actually boring (unlike vanilla Oblivion’s terrain).

Of course, MadMaximus says that Betrayal of Jarvall runs ‘just fine’ on an old quad-core and a Radeon 4870, neither of which I have or will have for a while. But you kind folks with beefier computers should be able to run it just fine. There’s about thirty more screenshots in the mod’s forum topic, so you can see them all right around here.

In fact, it stands for Middle Earth Roleplaying Project – a Lord of the Rings total conversion for one of my favouritest games of them all,  Oblivion.  It’s still very much work in progress, but it looks rather sexy.  We’re expecting a trailer in a couple of weeks, but for now, you’ll have to do with a few beautiful vistas and the promise of more to come.

If you’re half as excited as I am, check it out!  It all looks rather good.  Colour me titillated.  You can download the beta, so let us know how it is!

MERP Home Page

MERP on ModDB

Download MERP beta 0.2.4

God Tamriel was a weird place wasn’t it. The bandits must’ve been killing exactly the same number of skeletons as you to keep up with your ever increasing strength! And where did they get that armour? In all seriousness, I understand why Bethesda made the game the way they did, it was to give people who aren’t serious gamers a chance, but we’re serious gamers so we want a challenge right? How about something that’ll make you have to beware of who you pick a fight with till you are a little stronger?

When it came to picking our list of the 25 greatest mods it seemed, to me, that there would have to be one of the two big Oblivion mods included: either Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul (OOO) or Francesco’s Mod. Having enjoyed both, at different times, and having them both do very similar things I decided that the best option was to simply pick the slightly more popular one and run with that. However, it might be worth bearing in mind that everything I am about to say applies to both modifications, the decision to pick one over the other was only made because you can’t put the same thing on the list twice (no matter how much you want to).

Ok, slightly lengthy preamble over let’s talk about OOO.

Well, to begin with it is the seminal total overhaul mod for Oblivion, it goes ahead a rebalances everything (and I mean everything). I haven’t read the notes that come with it in their entirety – the brief version is 34 pages long – but I can tell you that no effort was spared. This can be seen in the changes to the game.

The main problem with Oblivion was immersion. It was very hard in the vanilla game not to notice the fundamental flaws with the world. NPCs had about 3 voices, there were no children anywhere, and people’s lives were carefully scripted with no simulation of spontaneity at all. It was ironic but Bethesda seem to have been trying so hard to make this a deep and fundamentally functional world that they forgot that humans can be convinced by smoke and mirrors. Oscuro’s can’t bring perfect immersion back, but it can at the very least bring it to that point where the most glaring flaws are gone. No longer will you encounter bandits with glass armour, or marauders with Daedric. That sort of stuff is reserved for top tier and very rare characters, in doing so he ups the value of that top tier loot, making you feel more invincible and unique the stronger you become. Conversely, when you start, beware of who you fight.

If you are going back to Oblivion then install this. It’ll make the game fresh, interesting and better. Honestly, this is the kind of mod that makes me praise not only the end result, but the vision and the work that went into making it a reality.

Why is it on our list?

Because it breathes life into a world resembling a latter day Frankenstein.

Get if from

http://www.oscurogamedesign.com/down-game-ooo-high.html

Easy to Install?

Whilst this does require a little more fiddling than most oblivion mods would the link above includes all the information you’ll need (and more) to get it running. Just be aware that there may be compatibility issues with other Oblivion Mods.

So, you are a budding modder. You have an idea and a basic understanding of how the tools you will be using work. That’s great, but before you begin upon what you will consider your magnum opus, why don’t we step back a bit and focus upon a few of the mistakes we, at UserCreated , don’t want to see.

Skip on past the break to read part one of my little series.

The Tower of Babel (a.k.a. too much ambition)

Let me be clear before I begin to rage on those mods that are going to fall prey to their creator’s  hubris: if you have no ambition you will never make it as a big name in the tough arena that is user generated content. What I’ll be talking about are those people who have big plans but don’t give themselves a realistic chance of success. Attempts such as these fall into two main categories: those that are never finished and those that don’t deliver what they promise.

In many ways this is merely a parallel of what happens in the wider games industry (after all, user generated content follows the same rules as that of the wider games industry), particularly when you deal with games like Spore which promise something which is clearly impossible – how on earth could Maxis seriously think they would promise the serious simulation of evolution and the creation of life in the way they promised?

It is all very well to want to make a total remake of your favourite game in the Source engine, but more often than not you will realise the staggering size of most games (not to mention the time and energy it takes to recreate it in a more advanced engine) precludes them from ever realistically being remade. Too often do I see, hidden away somewhere on the internet, plans to redo an old game in a new engine. Well publicised projects such as Black Mesa, which aims to recreate Half Life 1 in the Source engine, do much to add fuel to the fire of many a modder’s heart, but even this project has taken years of time from a large team. If you are working alone it would rapidly prove to be an impossible task.

Next, you must consider those who modify existing games in a major way. Here I’m thinking of what Team Fortress was to Quake, or as a more recent example, the Stargate modification for Oblivion that I reported on.  Whilst this holds my interest more than most games might, I nevertheless doubt that it will fulfil my wildest dreams. It is an enormous project, requiring a vast degree of new content just to be workable. The problem there is not so much with the size of the project, but with the practicalities of needing to create hundreds of new textures and models. My favourite mod of all time (which was the focus of a recent indulgence) used the original setting and a very small number of “new” items, yet managed to stand out from the others.

That pretty much wraps it up for this short introduction into what not to do. In a somewhat ironic twist given my last paragraph, next time I’ll be focusing upon mods which fail due to a lack of either innovation or (shock!) ambition.

Incidentally, please feel free to leave a comment if you have opinions of your own. I’d love to hear about your experiences: did you play a huge mod that was AWESOME? Or was it FAIL? Either way, share your experiences here.

This third instalment of my retrospective is proving difficult to write. I had set out to examine what new things you could bring into your game, using the skills of the community to add everything from crossbows to a chain mail bikini. I will endeavour to stick to this lofty ambition, but I must warn you: in this post I will be avoiding linking anything directly. Every time I tried to do this either my post ends up looking unfinished as I scramble around thinking “how could I have forgotten that?” or it ends up a long list of random components.

Anyway, small pre-emptive statement over we can return to the business of mods. Oblivion sucks you into a world that, at first, you don’t think you could possibly finish exploring. Unfortunately, as many a dedicated player will tell you, it is nevertheless a distinctly finite world. As someone who can pride themselves on having completed (almost) every quest and explored (almost) every ruin I can’t play Oblivion without adding new content. In many cases this isn’t just new armour and weapons but new dungeons, a whole questline about rebuilding Kvatch and more.

These are the things that really make this game worthwhile. Player made storylines are rarely, if ever, as polished as what Bethesda release but they add more to an already sprawling game. It is a peculiar problem of mine that I find the world in the vanilla build to be a little constrained. I was enthralled by the Assassin’s Guild storyline – even when I was roleplaying a good character I could never stop myself from murdering a poor innocent just to get into the guild – but it was too short. The imagination of the missions that line gave you, however, was taken up by the community. Many have written missions that blend with the guild, some have tried (with varying degrees of success) to extend the story but most have simply learned the lessons that we were taught when we played through the murder mystery for the first time: NPC interaction can be as wooden as the spoon I use to stir my soup and still not affect a brilliant piece of scripting.

It is my fervent hope that the additions that the community have made to the game are noticed by Bethesda as they work on the next instalment of the series because they are prime examples of what a little imagination can bring to a game. I urge you – yes YOU – to consider adding something a little extra to your game the next time you play it. The best resource for that would be TESNexus, which I have linked to many times before. I have tried to avoid linking directly in this post, mostly because it would imply that I can give you an informed decision as to what is the cream of the crop, but the reality is that I can’t say I have played everything out there – there is simply too much – it is up to you to go forth and try everything. If it sounds good just try it and if it isn’t good then try something else.

You never know till you try.

I’m not going to lie, I’m not only a huge Stargate fan but also a long time player of Oblivion mods, so this has me salivating at my poor computer. The original game gave you the feeling of absolute freedom that can only translate well into the Stargate universe. If this mod team manage to get that right on the money then this will be one of the big mods you want to play.

Go ahead and check out the page on ModDB for more details. Suffice it to say, I am very interested.

What I term total overhaul mods actually come in two flavours, and in the examples I am about to give, three mods. The first is what might be called one of the few “essential” mods for Oblivion. This means that I recommend you install it before anything else. The other two are more of a personal choice.  Read on to see what they are…

The Unofficial Oblivion Patch (and subsequent updates for Shivering Isles and the DLC) strives to fix a staggering number of the bugs that remained in the game long after release (last update was in October 2009). This is a prime example of a community coming together to fix the game that they are playing. In many ways it is almost inevitable that a game as large as Elder Scrolls IV will still have kinks after release, but there has been a total lack of the continuous updates (a la Valve) that one might expect. Instead this patch (which is really a mod – being user created) sets out to fix the problems. They claim that over 18000 bugs have been dealt with. I can’t confirm that, but the game does work nicely with the patch.

Once the patch is installed many long time players turn their eyes towards one of the “total overhaul” mods that are available. Oscuro’s Oblivion Overhaul and Francesco’s Mod both fulfil the same fundamental promise – they make the game a more natural experience by removing scaled enemies and by altering a lot of the rules in game – but they are different enough that if you are considering installing one of them it is well worth looking carefully over their respective notes. Another important consideration is checking whether they are compatible with anything else you might want to install. Because they are so expansive and over-arching they have the potential to create a great many conflicts with other content. Almost all mods will state if they have a conflict with one of these two – so bear that in mind when making any choices.

These two mods have one other major thing in common: they make the game a lot harder. As you emerge into the sunlight of Tamriel from the sewers you will confront a world where most enemies will be stronger than you. This adds a depth of immersion that was deeply lacking from the original build (after all, where did all those bandits get that ultra rare ebony armour?) and makes the game a much richer one.

I find it impossible to recommend one over the other so if you are looking to get back into Oblivion I suggest that you look at both and make your choice. Alternatively you could cheat and use FCOM (Francesco’s + WarCry + OOO + MMM) Francesco + WarCry + Oscuro + Martige. This massive mod combines, through magic, four of the biggest overhauls available adding a huge amount of new content. Try it out tonight.

Tomorrow we will be looking at new content for the game. Tune in for how to find a chainmail bikini for your Khajit.

In this several part piece I’ll be taking a whirlwind tour of the wide variety of mods that are available for Oblivion. I’ve found over my hundreds of hours playing the game that there are few aspects of it that haven’t in some way been altered by the community to be more streamlined and efficient, so I will attempt to share some of my favourites from the past few years with you.  Rather than simply compile a list, as have many in the community (I heartily recommend Wryre/A’s list at the Oblivion wiki) I’ll be pointing out a few of the major innovations that took place – sometimes very soon after the introduction of the game – and let you decide how you want to change your version.

Today’s post will be about what I most love: game and interface tweaks. It is somewhat inevitable that in any major new release there will be myriad complaints from the community, be it the number of people who desired that the world map in the game come in colour rather than the slightly bland not-quite-monochrome that was its default setting, or simply people who didn’t want to have to scroll through all four hundred keys that they had slowly accumulated over the course of a hundred hours of play. I consider mods of this type to be essential to making the experience of playing Oblivion a good one, particularly because of the many hours I’ve spent in the game. They streamline many of the game’s aspects and in some cases correct mistakes made by the developer which, once you’ve played the modded version, seem so obvious.

The first example I’ll pull out of the air is the keychain mod.  This was one of the major improvements made in the early days of the game and changes an entire aspect of inventory management. Without the mod your inventory will slowly accumulate keys, each one taking up its own slot in the inventory and slowly adding to the time it takes to get from the top to the bottom of the page. There was no earthly reason for this foolishness, particularly since the only thing you could do with a key once it was in your inventory was throw it away, so the community stepped up to the challenge and wrote a program that would allow all your keys to be put in a single key chain.

Another good example of a game-changing mod  would be the  100% Harvest Chance mod. One of my main gripes with the game is that there is a percentage based change to harvest any given plant. In some cases this has led my character down a path where he needs a single ingredient to form his high level potion but, due to bad luck, hasn’t managed to gain anything from an entire farm of corn.

Finally, my personal favourite comes in the form of a tiny addition – the ability to fast travel to your houses. I’m lazy and I keep all my stuff in my house. When I have finally come across a very nifty looking artefact I don’t want to have to walk across the map just to put it in a display case. With this little addition you don’t have to.

I’ve only talked about three individual mods in this post but the reality is that my current Oblivion game has about 30 active user created changes in it, the majority of which are like this small patches. They changed my game in ways that I have come to rely on and, I wouldn’t have been able to play the game as much as I do without them.

In my next post I’ll be looking at the huge overhauls that you can get for the game, and how they affect your experience.

A few more recommended tweaks:

Quest Award Leveller: levels-scaled quest rewards get stronger as you do! A must get mod if you want quest items to continue to be useful long after you acquired them

Colour Map: Don’t you hate the bland map?

At Home Alchemy: A quick fix that allows you to use your alchemy apparatus once they have been set down. A very useful fix if you don’t want to carry around the heavy alchemy apparatus.